In the video below, Fox News calls for racial profiling and the blatant violation of Muslims’ Constitutional rights, particularly in relation to the 4th and 14th Amendments.

At its core, racial profiling is racist because it targets certain groups based solely on their physical and cultural features. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) defines racial profiling as:

Racial profiling is a practice that presents a great danger to the fundamental principles of our Constitution. Racial profiling disproportionately targets people of color for investigation and enforcement, alienating communities from law enforcement, hindering community policing efforts, and causing law enforcement to lose credibility and trust among the people they are sworn to protect and serve. We rely on the police to protect us from harm and to promote fairness and justice in our communities. The despicable practice of racial profiling, however, has led countless people to live in fear and created a system of law enforcement that casts entire communities as suspect.

Many Americans think that racial profiling is a recent phenomenon. In the Huffington Post, Keith Rushing documents cases of racial profiling against African and Latino Americans throughout US history. The ACLU notes that racial profiling “continues to be a prevalent and egregious form of discrimination in the United States. This unjustifiable practice remains a stain on American democracy and an affront to the promise of racial equality.” It adds that “[s]ince September 11, 2001, new forms of racial profiling have affected a growing number of people of color in the U.S., including members of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities.”

According to Frank Hu in Criminal Justice Magazine, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is the obvious precedent for the treatment of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001. He writes,

At the time, virtually everyone in public life supported the mass incarceration of approximately 120,000 men, women, elderly, and children, some two-thirds of them native-born U.S. citizens. There were no criminal charges brought against them, no trials before juries, and no findings of guilt before almost all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast were ordered, in many cases on only a few days’ notice, into camps built in desolate swamp and desert areas. Allowed to take only what they could carry in what was euphemistically termed an “evacuation,” they remained behind barbed wire, under the watch of armed soldiers in guard.

The US would hit an all time low if it created internment camps for Muslim Americans in the future.